Man, are we hoping the doctor is right about this one.

Not that we wouldn’t be thrilled with another girl. We would. I don’t know if our house – or our sanity – would survive it, but if that’s what God gives us, we’ll give it our best shot. And we’ll reinforce our home’s foundation. Just in case.

You see, for those of you unfamiliar with my sweet little Dixie family, we have two beautiful little girls – a seven-year-old redhead and a four (excuse me. I mean four-and-a half) year old blonde. As expected, the eldest is a typical first-child, Type A control freak (why no, I don’t think she takes after me – why do you ask?). Blondie, however, is not your typical laid back, mellow, go-with-the-flow second child. She’s a Diva. A capital D hardcore Diva.

And when Redhead Diva and Blonde Diva clash in our house (which happens at least once every 27 seconds), I do what any responsible mom does – pretend to get an important phone call and lock myself in the laundry room  firmly assert my Mommy Authority and get the situation under control quickly and calmly.

Yeah, right. Actually, I’ve found that duct tape really is the way to go in these situations. Masking tape just isn’t strong enough once they get past the terrible threes, y’know.

So the thought of adding one more headstrong, opinionated, assertive female to the household (oh, like we’d get anything else) is enough to make my dear hubby’s twitch even worse (funny, he didn’t have that twitch while we were dating). 

In two weeks, we should know definitively whether the estrogen-testosterone ratio in our home will be somewhat balanced come December, or whether we should throw in the towel and move the family to a steel bunker in an effort to simply survive until someone heads off to college.

Pray for us, people. Pray for us.

And the due date? The same date our little Jake was born into Heaven. God is good.

I’m such a whiner.

But hey, here I am again – whoohoo!! And yes, it’s definitely past my bedtime, but I felt the need to write tonight. There are so many people around me in such pain – couples contemplating divorce, an ectopic pregnancy, serious illness and, so horribly, the premature delivery of twins resulting in the death of one baby.

It’s times like this when I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes from Abraham Lincoln:

I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.

Tonight is one of those times when I have nowhere else to go. And tonight is one of those times when I find clarity in my faith and understand a little bit better that I never have anywhere else to go. (Notice I don’t totally get it, because I’m a big huge screw-up, and I give thanks every day for God’s patience – otherwise he would have kicked me to the curb long ago.)

So I go to my knees and pray – and on nights like this, I don’t even know what to say. In times like this, words fail me. Fortunately, another thing I’ve learned is that I don’t have to say a word. He knows my heart, He knows the pain and He’s always there, ready to comfort us when we seek Him out.

Think I’m nuts or some crazed “Jesus Freak”? Just try it – or better yet, try Him. What do you have to lose – your pain? Your depression? Your anger? You’re right – it would be a shame if you lost all that, huh?

We also learned that our baby was a boy, and we’re so grateful for that knowledge. We’ve decided on a name – Carson Jacob – but we also decided that his nickname would be Jake. It’s a good old fashioned name that makes my dear knight smile every time he says it – he says it would sound good when pro sports broadcasters said it: “Here’s Jake Thompson taking the snap in the 2035 Super Bowl!” (Dads always seem to go straight to the Super Bowl for their proud dad fantasies, don’t they?)

This knowledge helps so much. I feel like I’ve passed through the fog of grief and emerged with God’s faithful promise of hope and peace lifting me up, encouraging me to go on, enjoy every moment I have with my princesses and look forward to the day when I can hold Jake in my arms. My heart is heavier, and until I can hold him, my arms will ache and never feel entirely full, but I am better. God’s love and His thoughtfulness in surrounding me with amazing friends have ensured that I am better. And I am grateful – thank you all for your love, prayers and support. They’ve all helped more than you will ever know.

Carson Jacob (Jake) Thompson

Born into Heaven

December 19, 2009

Sometimes, this is charming. The princesses think he’s the funniest thing in the world, and as goofy as he is, he usually gets me chuckling (as much as I try to hide it so as not to encourage him).

Occasionally, however, this…ahem…charming immaturity issue personality flaw trait can get a little, shall we say, dangerous – and therein lies the story of The Great Hog Hat Incident of 2010.

One of our family’s favorite activities is matching socks. I’m not kidding (and yes, we do have TV. Cable even. Not the Skinemax ones, the family channel stuff, but still). For us, it’s not so much that matching that’s fun, it’s what comes after – the sock fight. Yep, after calmly and patiently matching the socks, we dump them all on the bed, grab as many as we can for ammunition, scream “Sock fight!” at the top of our lungs, duck behind various pieces of furniture, and fire away.

(Look, it’s free fun, I don’t have to put on makeup or a bra to do it, and [most of] our socks get matched. Occasionally they end up so far under the furniture that we don’t find them for several months, but that’s a small price to pay. Don’t judge me, people.)

In the course of this fight (which can get brutal – Princess G has developed quite the fastball), we use anything available as cover – laundry baskets, books, pillows, etc. It just so happened this time that an Arkansas Razorback hog hat was in our bedroom chair (again, don’t judge me – I never claimed to be good at interior decorating), so dear hubby grabs it, puts it on as if he’s wearing a football helmet, and pounds the rest of us with a barrage of socks. Having declared himself the winner, I concede (by waiving a white sock, of course) and begin gathering the socks from the corner of the bedroom near the opposite side of the bed, while the princesses slink off, pouting in defeat, to scavenge for socks in the other corners.

Here’s where it gets weird. Heh.

My dear knight, in what I can only surmise was a misguided attempt to celebrate his victory, decides to do a front flip crossways over the bed from his side to mine. In the hog hat. (I told you he’s really a five-year-old.) Keep in mind, I’m on the floor on other side of the bed gathering socks. (If you do keep this in mind, you’ll be doing better than he did.)

You can probably imagine what happened next. He flips, impressively clears the hog hat (it has a fairly long snout) and even manages to stick the landing – directly on my foot. (That’s an automatic .5 deduction in the Olympics, buddy.) Realizing this fairly quickly (the inhuman shriek of pain from me may have clued him in), he tries to quickly step off my foot and nearly launches himself out of the second story bedroom window.

I scream in pain. He screams because he thinks he’s killed me and because he thinks he’s ending up facedown in the bushes two stories below. The princesses scream because mommy and daddy are screaming. The dog barks like we’re being invaded by a pack of German shepherds. Chaos reigns in the aftermath of the MOST BRUTAL SOCK FIGHT EVER.

Eventually, I stopped pounding the floor in agony (and wishing I was pounding his head instead of the floor) long enough to realize nothing was broken, although I certainly didn’t let him know it right away. (Oh, like he didn’t deserve that.) Needless to say, the hog hat has been put back in its rightful place (in a place of honor in my china cabinet, of course. Where did you think I kept it?), and my dear man-child has sworn off hog hat flipping forever and ever.

Y’all just do me a favor. No one send him a football helmet. The visions of the flip off the fridge while I try to make dinner are giving me nightmares.

He’s also proven time and again that He does indeed have a sense of humor. I mean, seriously, how can anyone look at a duck-billed platypus and not think that God’s a pretty funny character? Any omnipotent deity who’d create that thing surely enjoys a laugh every once in a while.

So I’m actively looking for the funny stuff and hoping to be able to share some gut-busting stories with you again soon. If you need a laugh in the meantime, search the web for more platypus images. Now I know why these guys have been passed over in the college mascot arena – “Go Playtipi!” just doesn’t roll off the tongue, and can you imagine the fan hats that you’d see in the stands? And you thought a Hog Hat was amusing.

So here I am a week later. I am numb. I rested for a day, I cried a lot, and I threw myself into preparing to host the extended Thompson family on Christmas Day (and that, my friends, is a lot of family). My only goals for Christmas were that my princesses would have a marvelous time, and I would hold it together through the entire day. Mission accomplished, I spent most of Saturday in bed or on the couch, watching the girlies enjoy their gifts and even occasionally joining in to play.

At first I thought I was numb because I was so exhausted. But, having slept more in the past couple of days than I have for most of December, I don’t think that’s the case. I think my brain is just trying to wrap itself around what has happened and what can, or should, or might, happen next.

My first miscarriage (and first pregnancy), almost exactly eight years ago, was the result of a blighted ovum- we never got to see a heartbeat before we found out the pregnancy was lost. I’ve always described that experience as a loss of innocence about pregnancy, and anyone who’s ever had a miscarriage can probably relate. Instead of worrying about morning sickness and stretch marks and cankles (none of them fun, I know), I worried about far different things during my second (and third) pregnancies – I checked the toilet tissue for spots of blood every time I went to the bathroom and felt like didn’t fully breathe until we saw those little heartbeats at seven weeks. Even after, that “shadow” – as my doctor describes it – never really left, because I never felt completely secure. I knew what could happen – not just intellectually, but in my heart – and the mere thought was intensely painful. 

(Please know, I’m not trying to minimize the fear of miscarriage that every pregnant woman experiences. I’m just trying to explain – and not very well, I’m afraid – that once you have experienced it, you never fully relax, and you never take one single day of your pregnancy for granted. Each day is a gift you relish.)

Now, with the loss of our baby after having seen the heartbeat (that theoretical line that, if you cross it, gives you a 95 percent chance that all will be well – given that, I’m glad I’ve never had the urge to gamble), I feel stuck in processing it. I want to understand what happened, but once I get that information (which may take six weeks), I don’t know what I’ll do with it. We realize now how much we really want another baby, but do we want to play the odds again? Can we even get pregnant again? I’m no spring chicken – was it a fluke that we got pregnant this time? And if we do get pregnant, at what point do I really believe we’re going to bring a baby home from the hospital?

And as I struggle with all this, I also struggle with why I’m even asking these questions. I know there are no answers to these questions. I know God is completely in control of all of this. I need to simply surrender it all to Him and look to Him for guidance and comfort. I know He is there – so why can I not just let go? Why am I struggling with my faith when He has always been faithful?

So I am numb. And I am praying. And I don’t know what will happen next.

After discovering the baby’s death by ultrasound Saturday afternoon (and thank you to my wonderful doctor, Elan Simckes, for leaving his family on the weekend to personally conduct the ultrasound, rather than sending me to a hospital ER), I had surgery late Saturday night to recover the remains so that genetic testing can be done in an effort to understand what happened. Given that it happened almost ten weeks in and that everything looked great, my doctor suspects a catastrophic genetic disorder such as Turner Syndrome. Once the testing is complete, I am so grateful that St. John’s Mercy Medical Center, through their Heart Prints program, will bury our baby in a special area of Calvary Cemetary in St. Louis.

I know some will say that we should not have shared our pregnancy news, especially with our children, until we had safely passed through the first trimester. To those people I would respectfully and with love offer the following for them to consider. We decided to go ahead and share our joyous news for several reasons: we did wait until we had seen a heartbeat on ultrasound twice and our doctor was confident that the baby looked great – once the heartbeat is seen, there is a more than 95% chance that a miscarriage won’t occur; we felt that the more people knew, the more people would pray for us, which we felt was very important; and, if something did go wrong, we knew we would need the support and help of our family and friends.

Some people might be able to hide that they’ve suffered a miscarriage – everyone handles grief in different ways. I am not one of those people. I’m usually a pretty upbeat person, but right now I am very sad, and I need to be able to be sad without having to either fake it that everything’s okay or come up with some goofy excuse for being less-than-perky. I also need to be able to share all of life – the great happiness and the great pain – with my family, including our children.

Loss is a part of life that, as much as we try to protect our children from, sometimes reaches them. With guidance from our wonderfully supportive doctor and pastor, we have gently but truthfully shared the news with our children. They are sad, but they are already thanking God in their prayers for taking “Peanut” (as they’d already christened the baby) to Heaven to be with Him. We have surrounded them with love from family and friends to help them work through their feelings and emerge even stronger and more resilient than they already are.

As for me – I am sad. I am grieving. I am crying a lot. It’s hard to even breathe when you have to discuss burying a baby – those are words that should never have to be spoken by any mother. But God is with me and has walked right beside me through this whole nightmare weekend. And through the haze of pain, He has shown me such love  and grace – my dear husband has been a rock and an incredible blessing, we’ve had amazing friends step up to take care of the girls with such love and open arms, and our family has been understanding and attentive. God is so good.

With God’s love and help, we will be okay. We will get through this, and someday we may even think about trying again. But right now, we’re going to mourn our loss and keep leaning on God’s grace and mercy to get us through. Thank you all for your prayers and love – they are needed and much appreciated. God bless you all.

One of my favorite holidays is almost here. Seriously, what’s not to like about a holiday where you stuff yourself silly and then watch football until its time to stuff yourself silly again? It definitely gives Christmas a run for its money.

In honor of Turkey Day, I started a tradition last year on this blog that I’ve decided must become an annual event. To that end, I give you the funniest Thanksgiving TV show episode ever, and a great example of how improper planning for an event can have disastrous consequences…especially when live turkeys are involved. Heh.

(Note: Further demonstrating the superiority of Macs over PCs, I was easily able to embed the code for the video on my Conversations site, because I manage it through iWeb. This is, of course, a WordPress blog – and it sucks. So, you can either click the link below to see the show, or you can click the link above to my business blog and see it right there. Thank you, Steve Jobs.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Turkeys Away on Hulu

I know. I’m sorry. I feel like I betrayed you – the one who’s been so loyal and always there for me whenever I wanted to write, whether it was late at night or early morning.

Who am I kidding? It was never early morning.

I hope you’ll forgive me. I’m trying to carve out little bits of time here and there to do purely fun writing, and that means you, my dear blog. My posts might be shorter than they used to, but at least I’ll be here for you again. Am I forgiven? Hugs? At least a handshake? Fist bump?

Sigh. I’ll take what I can get and try to earn your trust again. Or at least your pain-free publishing assistance. We can at least be civil, right?

P.S. Yes, Nancy, this also means I’m actively working on the book again. Mostly because I’m scared of what you’ll do to me if I don’t get to work on it.